Clown in a Cornfield review
A solidly entertaining slasher that extends an invitation to a specific generation of film watchers.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
Clown in a Cornfield
Directed by Eli Craig
Screenplay by Carter Blanchard and Eli Craig
Starring Katie Douglas, Aaron Abrams, Carson MacCormac, Kevin Durand, Will Sasso, Vincent Muller and Cassandra Potenza
Clown in a Cornfield Review
In 2021 Netflix made some waves with a trilogy of horror movies based on author R.L. Stine’s Fear Street series. They proved to be instantly popular. There’s even a new installment hitting the streaming service this week. There is a moment in the first movie, Fear Street Part One: 1994, that I found fascinating. It involves one of our canon fodder characters being fed to a bread slicer. A neat kill, to be sure…but one that left me wondering who the movie was intended for. It’s the most brutal moment in the series…a kill that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Terrifier movie. The rest of the story plays out firmly as a young adult horror movie. A gateway film for tweens unsure if they’re into the genre. Perfect for viewers who tuned in to Stranger Things when they were five years younger.
One year before Fear Street arrived on screens, Adam Cesare’s Clown in a Cornfield hit bookstores everywhere. Five years later…its film adaptation feels like a perfect fit for those Stranger Things kids who became Fear Street tweens. The logical next step on a path towards horror lovers. If Fear Street was a gateway…Clown in a Cornfield is a bridge. The kind of teen focused slasher film that could truly ignite a passion for the oft maligned subgenre.
As any 80s kid would attest…we never had this kind of slow ingratiation into the slasher world. We were dropped into the deep end. Slasher films of the 80s were, for better and for worse, as synonymous with horror as Kleenex is with tissues. Freddy, Jason and Michael Myers were iconic. It wasn’t unexpected to see their faces pop up on MTV or any other pop-culture hot spot. The meta-revelation that was 1996’s Scream was born straight out of a generation raised on a post-1978 Halloween slasher boom. Cheap knockoffs lined the shelves of now defunct video stores everywhere. There was no escaping them. And there were no training wheels.
Clown in a Cornfield removes those training wheels to deliver something that cinema screens have needed for a while now. A slasher movie aimed directly at teens. Not the teens raised on the gore and nudity feast of the 1980s. The teens who, 9 years ago, were watching the first season of Stranger Things through their fingers. Dabbling in a genre that had seen an arbitrary line drawn between “elevated” and “trash”. Fear Street gave them a trilogy to watch at sleepovers. Clown in a Cornfield gives them back the silver screen.
Obviously, there have been plenty of slasher movies hitting theaters…and teens tend to flock to those movies without the path being so cleanly paved for them. Plenty sneaked in to see the unrated Terrifier movies. The Scream series is still going. Clown in a Cornfield itself evokes the feel of the recent Eli Roth hit Thanksgiving. Teens, or at least young adults, populate those film casts. Clown in a Cornfield takes it a step further. Most slasher movies target their slaughter on the young…Clown in a Cornfield makes the concept its motive.
Quinn (Katie Douglas) moves to Kettle Springs, Missouri with her father following the death of her mother. She isn’t thrilled by the change…especially when she sees how little is going on in this one horse town. She quickly falls in with a group that the town elders seem to have it out for. A group whose ranks are quickly thinned when a killer clown begins picking them off one by one.
Clown in a Cornfield has everything you’d expect a modern slasher to have…and it has fun doing all of it. It’s funny, slick, well-cast. It has fun kills, a twist…and even something to say about why all this is happening. That last part is the one aspect of Clown in a Cornfield that feels a bit heavy handed…but we’ll award points for effort. Especially when the story is so pointedly aimed at its target audience.
The twist that happens a little over halfway through Clown in a Cornfield is an earned one. It’s a reveal that makes perfect sense given the hints the story lays out ahead of time. Once it happens…you’ll know exactly where the movie is heading…but it fits the story so well that it isn’t an issue. In fact, there really isn’t any issue with how Clown in a Cornfield goes about its business. This is a rock solid time at the movies. Part throwback to the golden age of slashers…part full-throated scream to a new generation that these films are yours now. Director Eli Craig was a teenager during those glory days of 80s slashers. He’s helmed more than an olive branch for a new age of film goers…he’s crafted a baton in hopes that they will, one day, pick it up and keep paying it forward in blood.
There have been better slasher movies to hit screens than Clown in a Cornfield…and there have certainly been worse. Rarely, however, has a slasher movie come along that feels so full of purpose in attracting a specific audience. It invites the kids and tweens who have grown up on Netflix into the movie theater. Anyone who enjoys slashers can find something to like about Clown in a Cornfield. Anyone who abhors them will undoubtedly find something to hate. In this specific case, however, it may be more interesting and, ultimately, more important…what pre-teens who saw the bread slicer scene in Fear Street and said “I’d like more of that” think of it. It was made for them, after all.
Scare Value
I didn’t get around to talking a lot about the actual movie in this review. It carries a fun energy throughout, is filled with good characters…and has enough blood to satisfy film goers. I referred to it as a bridge because it crosses into the more dangerous feel of horror more often than Fear Street…but not as much as other slashers in the market. You won’t confuse it with Terrifier 2…but it might just get someone to add that to their watchlist.
3.5/5
Clown in a Cornfield Link
Buy tickets on Fandango
